UW Volleyball | Huskies head to USC after better seeding
Tough road matches. Washington volleyball coach Jim McLaughlin likes them because they help his players prepare for the demands of the NCAA tournament, which begins in two weeks.
Tough road matches also scare McLaughlin a little when they come this late in the season, when his team is jockeying for a preferred seeding in the tournament.
Tonight, the fifth-ranked Huskies (23-2, 12-2 Pac-10) visit eighth-ranked USC (21-4, 10-4). It will be the Huskies’ third consecutive contest against a top-10 foe. FSN will broadcast the match between the Pac-10’s second- and third-place teams live at 7:30 p.m.
“We’re playing for a seed now, for a better road to the Final Four,” McLaughlin said. “Playing SC is big. We’ve got to take care of it.”
The Women of Troy are 7-0 at home against Pac-10 opponents, defeating first-place (and third-ranked) Stanford at the Galen Center 3-1 last month. USC, where McLaughlin coached the men’s program to a national title in 1990, has won 21 consecutive home matches over two seasons.
Washington heads to Los Angeles after two tough home matches last week, a 3-2 defeat against Stanford in front of 4,117 at Edmundson Pavilion and a 3-1 victory over No. 6 California.
“There were times [against Stanford] we played really well against a good team,” McLaughlin said. “There were segments of the match where I thought, ‘Ooh, this is a very high level of volleyball.’ Some of the rallies were awesome to watch.
“The thing that kills me, and I’m over it now, is that we were up 17-12 in Game 3 [with the match tied 1-1] and we just relaxed a little. We relaxed instead of crushing them.”
The defeat ended a 39-match home winning streak for UW. A possible cause?
“They [the Huskies] were so geeked up and so into the crowd that I don’t think we managed it right,” McLaughlin said.
Notes
• Washington visits 10th-ranked UCLA (17-8, 7-7) on Saturday. McLaughlin has won at Pauley Pavilion just once (2004) in six previous seasons. A 3-2 defeat against the Bruins in Los Angeles was the only blemish during UW’s 2005 national-title season (32-1).
• As of Thursday, UW had not released any names for its incoming recruiting class of 2008. The Web site Prepvolleyball.com projected that three area recruits would join the Huskies next fall: Newport’s 6-foot-5 Lauren Barfield, the KingCo 3A player of the year, 6-2 Kelcey Dunaway of Bainbridge and 6-foot Bianca Rowland of King’s.